The efficient communication of information over computer networks is very important for individuals, corporations, and governments in a world in which networks play an ever increasing role in commerce, science, and world affairs. Efficient communication of information is promoted in networked multi-vendor environments by having a standard method of formatting the information.
Relational databases provide one method of formatting, manipulating, and exchanging information in a networked computing environment. Relational databases are widely used, have been in use for many years, and have many support tools. For example, query languages, such as the Structured Query Language (SQL), are in common use for retrieving information from a relational database. Unfortunately, there are many competing relational database systems in use and the data formatting is not uniform among these systems. This variation in data formatting makes database files unsatisfactory vehicles for exchanging information in a multi-vendor environment.
On the other hand, in applications requiring information exchange, hierarchical data formats, such as the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), are becoming a standard. Using XML as a standard formatting language for exchanging information has several advantages. First, XML is a text based language, which allows the XML data to be exchanged across a multitude of computer systems that may be based on different binary data representations. Second, XML is a tag oriented language. Tags permit the creator of the data to express the semantics of the data and to capture the hierarchical relationships in the data in a way that is self-describing. Unfortunately, XML has not yet been extensively woven into relational database systems.
For these and other reasons there is a need for the present invention.